Since then I have been crunching the total voter tallies in an Excel spreadsheet and I have changed my opinion a little bit. When you ignore the UK's awful first-past-the-post constituency voting system — which suppresses votes in some seats and magnifies them in others — the left did well in Britain.

Here is a chart that divides the parties into left and right blocs. I've placed the Liberal Democrats on the right even though some might argue they are a centre-left party:

Jim Edwards

The first thing to note is that the left-wing parties grew their total vote between 2010 and 2015.

The shift is also illustrated by this chart, which the BBC tucked away on its election web site. It shows the Conservative gain was the smallest (except for the Liberals):

Perhaps more importantly, the total vote shift in favour of the left looks like this:

Gains by left-wing parties: +2.6 million votes

Losses from right-wing parties: -828,000 votes.

The reason the Conservatives won has to do with where all those votes fell. The SNP added nearly 1 million votes but took those from Labour candidates in Scotland, which hasn't been Tory country for decades. The Green Party quintupled its national vote but its 1.1 million supporters are so spread out they make no difference. Labour added votes, just not geographically.

The first-past-the-post parliamentary system did the job it is supposed to do — return a majority in the House of Commons for the party with the most votes. But the result nonetheless came from such a distortion of the actual underlying votes that you can argue it's better evidence for voting law reform than for keeping the status quo.